FIELD OF THE INVENTION
The present invention relates to a novel allyl alcohol derivative which is useful as an intermediate for the synthesis of physiologically active compounds having strong physiological activity such as leucotriene B.sub.4 (LTB4), lipoxine, hydroxyeicosatetraene (HETE), etc., the present invention further relates to a process for producing these leucotrienes B.sub.4.
Physiologically active compounds such as leucotriene B.sub.4, etc., have been noted so far and various processes have been proposed for synthesizing these compounds. Particularly, it has been known that leucotrienes have strong physiological activity and, for example, leucotriene B.sub.4 has strong leukocyte attracting effect. In view of the above, although there have been proposed various synthesis processes for the leucotrienes, these conventional synthesis processes involve many problems.
For example, while various processes for synthesizing leucotriene B4 have been known, most of these are methods which comprises complicated steps using optically active intermediates derived from saccharides. While on the other hand, the following methods have been known as the process which do not use saccharide-derived optically active intermediates.
(1) A method of using an optically active ynol derivative obtained by subjecting an ynone derivative to asymmetric hydrogen reduction using an optically active hydrogenated boron reagent as the starting material (Nicolaou, et al., J. Amer. Chem. Soc. 106, 3548 (1984)) ##STR2##
(2) A method using an optically active .alpha.-oxyaldehyde obtained by utilizing enzymatic asymmetric reduction or asymmetric hydrolysis (C. J. Sih, et al., J. Org. Chem., 51, 1253 (1986)) ##STR3##
However, any of the processes (1) or (2) above is not practical as the process for producing leucotriene at a high purity and in a great amount, because it requires expensive asymmetric reducing agent and it is poor in the yield and the selectivity in the asymmetric reaction.